The Nightingale

In 1995, on the Oregon coast, an elderly woman climbs into her attic and opens a steamer trunk she hasn't touched in thirty years.

In 1995, on the Oregon coast, an elderly woman climbs into her attic and opens a steamer trunk she hasn't touched in thirty years. Beneath baby shoes and crayon drawings, she finds a wartime identity card bearing the photograph of a young woman named Juliette Gervaise. Her hands shake. Her son Julien finds her crying among the cobwebs and asks who Juliette Gervaise is. She cannot answer—not yet. But the card has broken something loose inside her, and the memories she spent a lifetime burying begin their slow, irresistible ascent. She wants, at last, to be known.

A mobilization and an expulsion set two sisters adrift

In the Loire Valley summer of 1939, Vianne Mauriac tends her stone farmhouse Le Jardin with husband Antoine and daughter Sophie. Their mother died when Vianne was fourteen and Isabelle four; their father, broken by the Great War, abandoned both girls to a stern caretaker. Vianne survived by marrying Antoine young. Now he is mobilized—he hides money in the mattress, promises to return, and walks through iron gates into a military camp. Hundreds of miles away, eighteen-year-old Isabelle is expelled from yet another finishing school. Her father reluctantly allows her back to his Paris apartment, where she dreams of heroism and reads about nurse Edith Cavell. When the Germans advance on Paris, he forces Isabelle onto a refugee convoy heading south—toward a sister she hasn't seen in years.

Isabelle finds love and machine-gun fire fleeing Paris

Separated from her traveling companions when their car runs out of petrol, Isabelle joins millions of refugees walking south through blistering heat. In a forest at nightfall, she meets Gaëtan Dubois—a sharp-faced communist recently released from prison, roasting a stolen rabbit over a fire. He feeds her, shares wine, and treats her as an equal. They walk together for days, holding hands. Near Tours, German planes strafe the refugee column—Gaëtan throws himself over Isabelle as machine guns tear lines through the grass and a church explodes around them. He promises to take her to fight. But when Isabelle collapses at Le Jardin's back door, she wakes to find him gone. A note pinned to her bloodied dress reads that she is not ready. First love and first abandonment arrive in a single stroke.

A Wehrmacht captain claims the guest room beneath the stairs Pétain announces France's surrender. Isabelle is enraged; Vianne believes the old marshal is saving lives. De Gaulle broadcasts from London that the flame of resistance must not die, and Isabelle hears a call to arms her sister cannot fathom. Their split…